I had a special request from someone who wanted me to post up my recipe for delicious chili! So here it is. Enjoy! Or don’t. But I hope you do! If you want. Anyhow, here it is.

(here is where there would be a picture, but apparently I’ve never photographed my chili process! I have pictures of the last split pea and ham soup I made, but no chili. So here’s what you get instead)

This makes a considerable amount of chili. The numbers may be halved for a more reasonable experience. Also, feel free to play with the spices until you find a mix you like. I find this mix tends to be hot enough to get attention, but not so hot that it overwhelms the flavor.

Frankly, I’m getting a bit burned-out. I mean, the ongoing amateur hour White House is a source of much amusement, yes, but it’s also a source of great anxiety for people like me. I laugh so I don’t cry, but even the laughter starts to get a bit tiring after a while.

So I’m stepping away. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone for, but I’ll be back eventually. Just you wait and see. In the meantime, I leave you with this.

What happens when a conservative Republican ex-president, who has been out of office for more than two decades, decides he’s completely out of fucks to give, and starts looking at the damage his policies caused?

This is the premise of Epix’s TV series Graves, which began airing last year. Somehow I’d not heard of it. I’m guessing I was too busy paying attention to real politics. Or perhaps their PR just sucked. But either way, I’m glad to have found it now..

Nick Nolte plays the titular character, who, it is implied, was a two-term Republican president that came along after Reagan but before Clinton. He’s now retired and living in New Mexico, and is becoming very unhappy with his life. After a confrontation with former New Mexican governor Bill Richardson, he starts looking at the way his time in office is being remembered. He starts to realize some of the consequences that were experienced by the American public when he did things like cut cancer research, “get tough” on illegal immigration, or speak out against gay marriage.

He looks at these things with the distance of time and wisdom and doesn’t like what he sees. So he starts acting up and speaking out. As this is going on, his wife is being courted by the Republican establishment to run for the Senate, his daughter is going through a divorce, and his estranged son has returned from service overseas.

To a great extent the series is a liberal wank-fest. We all want to have someone like Bush 41 or W admit that they were wrong in what they believed and fought for. We want to have a moment where they say, “Yeah, I fucked up, and shouldn’t have done X, Y, or Z.”

But the show does this liberal wank-fest in a very entertaining way. Nick Nolte is absolutely magnificent as the main character, and Sela Ward is fantastic as the former First Lady. The rest of the cast is spot-on, as well, and there are many cameos by the likes of Bill Richardson, Rudy Giuliani, Barney Frank, Michael Steele, and others.

If you’ve got a hankering for an enjoyable diversion of a political series, do check this out. It isn’t quite as sharp as Alpha House, but it’s still very good. You can find it through Epix’s channel on Sling, and possibly your cable provider. It’s also available on the various streaming services. Vudu has the first two episodes for free, and the series as a whole is only $20 through them. Not bad!

The nomination and approval of Besty “Eeek! A grizzly!” de Vos for Education Secretary has had me spending some time thinking about education and what I’d like to change about it. There are many things, but in the context of this particular person, I’m thinking about it when it comes to school choice.

School choice is, broadly, the concept that parents should have a choice as to where their child goes to school. In principle, this is a good thing. It means that parents can get their kid out of a public school they judge to be failing and put them into z private school that they judge to be better, and best of all, they can do this with the state paying some or part of this, due to school vouchers.

These vouchers provide a certain amount of money for less well-off parents so that they can afford private education for their kids. Again, in principle, this isn’t a bad thing.

But when someone does this, they’re taking money away from public schools that are generally poorly-funded to begin with. So if a school is already failing, they’re likely to fail even more, due to the fact that they’re now losing money.

It used to be that almost everyone sent their kids to public schools. There were private and religious schools, but either the wealthy sent their kids to them, or the less well-off used scholarships.

With most people’s kids attending public schools, this means that people had a stake in how those schools perform (which we all have anyhow, but you know what I mean). It meant that they were willing to do things to improve them, like volunteer or pay higher taxes.

Sadly, the Republicans continue their desire to privatize everything, including education, and so we get into school vouchers.

I am generally in favor of freedom of choice, and if you can afford, on your own or with scholarships, to send your child to a private school, go for it. But I’m severely against the government assisting you with doing so. If the school your kid is going to isn’t doing as well as you think it should, go find out why, and work to change it. Run for the local school board, even. It couldn’t hurt, and it might help.

But abandoning the idea of public education is stupid, wrong, and just generally terrible, and that’s where this is leading us.

Good ole Mister Plinkett, of Red Letter Media, released a video a couple of months back that I missed out on. It’s his analysis of why The Force Awakens didn’t really work well as a movie. I can agree with pretty much all his points here, though he does go on, and on, and on, for quite some time before actually getting to them.

Nixon was, in many ways, an amazing president. He opened up trade relations with China, started up the EPA, and…well, ok, that’s about for what I can really think of.

Mostly he was just a terrible president and a terrible human being. First off, he deliberately extended the Vietnam war to make himself look better. Treason if there ever was. Second, the whole Watergate thing, with everything that tied into that. Also things like massive levels of abuse of power, including targeting those on his rather infamous “enemies list”.

And notably, especially for our discussion today, he lied. He lied constantly. He lied about stupid shit. He lied like other men breathe. He lied while breathing. He was just an absolutely terrible man with almost no redeeming features who should have never been allowed near the levers of power.

And yet…I’d much rather have him office than Trump. Nixon would lie like a cheap rug, yet I get the impression that, at least in part, he did have our country’s best interests at heart. He was in it for the ego, sure, as are almost all politicians, but at the end of the day, he clearly had at least some desire to better our country. He at least had a basic understanding of domestic policy, and a decent understanding of foreign policy.

Compare this with Trump. Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd, and about the ratings for said event, he lied about the media covering up terrorist attacks, he lied about the Muslim ban, saying he never wanted such a thing, he lied about millions of illegal votes being cast against Hillary. He lies, lies, lies, pretty much every time he opens that ugly orange face of his, and you know what’s even worse? I’ll tell you.

Nixon made up for his lies, to a point, with competency. Trump hasn’t. Also, Jesus fuck me Christ, we’re less than a month into this administration, and look at what an unmitigated shit-show it’s already become! Trump and team are a global embarrassment, and and all the pointless, stupid, ego-stroking lies are a part of this.

Really, he’s just a horrible person, and the sooner our current long, national nightmare is over, the better.